Dragon Ball Season Four Box Set

Guest Author - Lesley Aeschliman

The Dragon Ball Season Four DVD box set includes five DVDs that contain 30 episodes. The first four discs contain seven episodes, and the fifth disc contains two episodes and the DVD extras. The focus of this set is the conclusion of the Tenkaichi Tournament and King Piccolo's attempt to take over the world.

On the main menu of the first four discs, you can choose to watch all the episodes, watch the disc with the marathon feature, choose which episode you want to watch, and set up your language and subtitle options. One of the best features of this set is the marathon feature; this allows you to watch all of the episodes back-to-back. However, with the marathon feature, you only see the opening credits once, and the ending credits are not shown. This feature is very helpful when you're trying to watch all of the episodes on a disc in a single sitting. In the setup menu, you can choose between English and Japanese audio. You can also choose to turn the subtitles on and off.

The menu on the fifth DVD adds in a link for the special features. However, the features aren't very special. All you get are the textless versions of the opening and ending credits (which are the same as what appeared on the first three DVD box sets), and trailers. The trailers included on this set are for Tsubasa, S.A.V.E., xxxHOLiC, Heroic Age, The Slayers, Soul Eater, Ah! My Goddess, and Dragon Ball.

Overall, the episodes that appeared on this set are rather decent. My biggest disappointment with this set was how FUNimation decided to split the episodes between discs. Instead of trying to divide the episodes out a little more evenly between discs, they decided to cram as many episodes as they could on the early discs in the set, and only placing two episodes on the final disc. To me, this breakdown just makes absolutely no sense. It would have made more sense to put six episodes onto each disc, and tacking what little bonus features there are on the final disc.

While I'm a little disappointed by the episode breakdown of the discs and by the lack of special features, this set is still a "must get" for any Dragon Ball fans that want to own the series on DVD.

In order to write this review, I checked out a copy of this DVD box set through the King County Library System.